Alternatives to the packrat package - package reproducibility

Question

Packrat is a neat tool in theory, but for years it has been plagued by huge hang times upon starting RStudio, and the devs don't seem to be able to fix the issue. It's become unsustainable in my project. Does anybody have any good alternatives to packrat? Google searches did not turn up anything useful, so any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I'll assume you're using Packrat for reproducibility, rather than version control.

Start with the CRAN task view for reproducible research , specifically the section on Package Reproducibility. You'll find it suggests checkpoint, rbundler and packrat.

Another approach is to move from Base R to Microsoft R open. It has reproducibility built in.

Side Note: As an example use case of reproducibility, let's assume you've written some R code with packages. Then you share your research. But the package owner makes a change between the time you did the research and the time someone else is trying to reproduce your research. The change made by the package owner breaks your research. In order for someone to reproduce your research, they need to use your code WITH THE ORIGINAL PACKAGE - not the new package.

Answer 2

{renv} is developed by the RStudio folks and aims to solve at least some of the problems that packrat had: https://blog.rstudio.com/2019/11/06/renv-project-environments-for-r/

"The goal then is for renv to be a robust, stable replacement for the Packrat package, with fewer surprises and better default behaviors."